For years, the CPU was the bottleneck for animating thousands of characters. Standard pipelines involved heavy CPU work: sampling animations, blending layers, processing hierarchies, and uploading bone matrices to the GPU. This severely limited the number of unique characters that could be animated on screen at once.
That narrative is changing.
Morph target animation—also known as blend shapes or shape keys—is undergoing a massive technical revolution. Traditionally used for facial expressions and character speech, this vertex-based animation technique is no longer restricted to rigid, pre-baked linear transitions. Driven by modern game engines, machine learning, and advanced GPU pipelines, morph targets are becoming highly dynamic, memory-efficient, and central to realistic real-time graphics. morph target animation new
While highly effective, traditional morph targets suffer from severe limitations: For years, the CPU was the bottleneck for
If you want to implement these techniques in your current workflow, tell me: Which are you using? What is your target platform ? (PC, console, mobile, or web) That narrative is changing
One of the biggest issues with animating long pieces using bones is . When you bend a tube using bones, the mesh often collapses on the inner curve.